“David Bowie: The Last Five Years” reflects on the final projects of the artist’s life. Premieres tonight on HBO.

“Doctor Who” may have had its global premieres synchronized, but it took a year for “David Bowie: The Last Five Years,” a film about Britain’s other great cultural spaceman, to make it to the United States.

Francis Whately’s film, which premiered in the UK in January 2017, comes to HBO tonight on what would have been the singer’s 71st birthday and two days before the second anniversary of his death from liver cancer.

Not much has changed in that time, of course, at least as concerns us here. Bowie still feels essential, necessary and oddly present — a useful example, the global legend as inspirational outsider. This is briefly a sad story — he dies in the end — but it isn’t a tragic one.